History professor Benjamin Lawrance tackles urgent need for copyright debate to continue

The Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS) hosted University of Arizona historian Prof Benjamin N Lawrance to tackle intellectual property, restitution and the unfinished business of reclaiming black artistic legacies.

Lawrance is an eminent historian of law and society whose work is redefining how South Africa confronts its tangled past of creative ownership. 

Last Friday he joined Johannesburg audiences at The Bioscope at 44 Stanley in Auckland Park for the screening of Ernest Cole: Lost and Found.

The documentary traces the journey of the exiled South African photographer whose archive, long thought lost, resurfaced under circumstances that exposed the fragility of black ownership in global cultural markets. Cole’s story is emblematic of a larger struggle: for decades, South African creatives have been alienated from the rights to their work, with many exiled artists seeing their copyrights swallowed by white agents or foreign institutions.

The urgency of the conversation is not confined to the past. While copyright law remains framed in broad and supposedly neutral terms, it has consistently failed to protect black South African creatives.

As Lawrance stressed in his lectures, the “colour-blindness” of copyright statutes concealed the racial inequalities that dictated who controlled art, music, literature and photography.

At JIAS, Lawrance’s two public lectures tackled these themes head-on.

The first, “Original Apartheid Hustler: The Life and Times of Dugmore Boetie”, co-presented with Dr Vusumuzi Kumalo, history lecturer at Nelson Mandela University, revisited the story of a brilliant writer whose manuscript was posthumously published under his white editor’s name. Boetie’s legacy was distorted, his reputation tarnished and his voice silenced by literary exploitation. Lawrance and Kumalo’s forthcoming book with Wits University Press in 2026, part of the Jias African Biographies Project, restores Boetie’s identity, challenging racial erasure while proposing a new framework for decolonial storytelling and historical justice.

Through an interdisciplinary lens, the book offers a powerful framework for restoring black histories, decolonial storytelling and historical justice in South Africa.

The second lecture, “White Takes Black: How Black South African Creatives Lose Control of Copyright, from Apartheid to the Present”, explored the systematic exploitation that deprived figures such as Miriam Makeba, Solomon Linda, Dumile Feni and Bloke Modisane of rightful control over their intellectual property. Lawrance drew a through-line from apartheid era dispossession to contemporary disputes, showing how the colonial scaffolding of copyright law continues to shape creative industries today.

These questions are far from abstract. In 2017, the courts declared the Miriam Makeba Foundation held “sole and exclusive” rights to the late singer’s intellectual property, a landmark ruling that underscored the stakes of ownership. Today, cases such as the dispute between the Wozasisi Collective and celebrity photographer Trevor Stuurman sharpen the debate. The Western Cape High Court recently granted the Collective an interdict over the exhibition Your Beauty Is My Concern, finding Stuurman’s work infringed on their concept through passing off.

Taken together, the cases, screenings and lectures suggest a turning point. After decades of dispossession, there is a rising call for restitution, repatriation and reform. For Lawrance, South Africa’s challenge lies not only in rewriting statutes but also in rewriting the stories of its artists giving credit, and rights, where they have long been denied.

As audiences filed out of The Bioscope last week, the mood was reflective. Cole’s images, Boetie’s words and the countless silenced voices behind them sought to demonstrate cultural freedom is never guaranteed. It must be legally challenged, historically and publicly.